The White House scrambled on Monday to prevent conservative backlash over the president's choice of White House counsel Harriet Miers as his next Supreme Court nominee.
Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, started calling influential social conservatives to reassure them about the pick even before it was announced. He called James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, over the weekend, and Richard Land, a top public policy official of the Southern Baptist Convention on Monday morning, several sources said.
Veteran conservative organizer Paul Weyrich said Ed Gillespie, the former Republican Party chairman lobbying for confirmation, called at 7:10am to tell him the news.
PHOTO: AP
In each call and in a series of teleconferences throughout the day, representatives of the White House promised their conservative supporters that as White House counsel, Miers had played a central role in picking the many exemplars of conservatism among Bush's previous nominees.
The administration's efforts failed to forestall a day of protests from other social conservatives. Many say the president promised them a conservative nominee in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, which would put within their grasp a victory in the 30-year fight over court decisions about abortion, gay rights and religion in public life. Miers has made no clear statements of her legal views on any of those issues.
"Conservatives feel betrayed," Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of conservative direct mail, said. "President Bush blinked."
Indonesia yesterday began enforcing its newly ratified penal code, replacing a Dutch-era criminal law that had governed the country for more than 80 years and marking a major shift in its legal landscape. Since proclaiming independence in 1945, the Southeast Asian country had continued to operate under a colonial framework widely criticized as outdated and misaligned with Indonesia’s social values. Efforts to revise the code stalled for decades as lawmakers debated how to balance human rights, religious norms and local traditions in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The 345-page Indonesian Penal Code, known as the KUHP, was passed in 2022. It
US President Donald Trump on Friday said Washington was “locked and loaded” to respond if Iran killed protesters, prompting Tehran to warn that intervention would destabilize the region. Protesters and security forces on Thursday clashed in several Iranian cities, with six people reported killed, the first deaths since the unrest escalated. Shopkeepers in Tehran on Sunday last week went on strike over high prices and economic stagnation, actions that have since spread into a protest movement that has swept into other parts of the country. If Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to
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